Knitting, Sci-fi and other stuff...

4⭐️.5🌶 I finished my ARC of Umbra by Catalina Matei last evening.  It was okay.  It is being marketed as book one of a new series.  Now that I've read some other reviews, (I like to go in blind and don't read reviews prior to reading books usually.) This is more like book 4 in a series, which is why I felt so lost at first.  We as readers are dumped into the thick of it twelve months after a pivitol event happens.  Nearly the entire book is told in flash backs to catch us up to where we are.  There is a bunch of info dumping and so much internal monolog.  It wasn't difficult to follow necessarily but it was not a style of storytelling I'm used to that's for sure.  It was difficult to connect with the characters as their grief felt more like whining because we weren't given a chance to connect with them emotionally.  We were constantly being buffeted from the past back to the present.  The bulk of the story was depressing as ...

5⭐️4🌶 I finished listening to Waiting for Him by Samantha Cole.  I loved this one!  I thought the spice and thriller plot lines were much more balanced.  They were interwoven in this book and the switch back and forth was seamless and logical to the overall plot.  Kat quite literally comes back from the dead.  She and her family had been involved in a car accident 12 years prior to the beginning of the book.  Ben "Boomer" thought her entire family had died.  What in fact happened is her mother and brother had died in the accident, but she and her father had lived.  That accident was actually a hit by the Russian mob her father had gotten himself involved with.  Her and her father were put in witness protection and they had been living on the west coast under assumed names.  Kat's father had passed away a few months ago.  When her apartment was broken into and she thought she was being followed she turned to the only per...

5⭐️2🌶 I finished the ARC of Taken by the Tide by Invi Wright yesterday evening.  I loved it!  It was a quick read at just over 300 pages.  The FMC, Sadie is snarky and sarcastic and I love that her mind is firmly in the gutter.  The opening line of the book is dialog between Sadie and Kyros.  Its her asking him “Do you think mermen have dicks?"  If you read the blurb for the book, you know that Kyros is a merman so it makes that question even more funny in my opinion.  Kyros is very quiet and grumpy while in human form on the crabbing vessel that Sadie, Sadie's father and the one other deck hand Tipper, utilize.  After Kyros throws Sadie overboard, in an attempt to kill her during a storm, she doesn't drown.  Instead she starts breathing underwater water.  This means she's a hybrid and potentially very valuable to Kyros and his people.  He whisks her away to his pod and the story really commences from here.  Kyros ...

4.5⭐️3🌶 I finished His Angel by Samantha A Cole on my way into work.  The ending was quite sad so I'm a little depressed now.  I should say the very end was nice and sweet, it was the outcome of the spy/thriller subplot portion that was sad.  I enjoyed this audio book overall.  The narration was good.  It was a single male narrator this time and I thought he did a good job with the female voices.  These books have a BDSM romance plot then a spy/thriller subplot.  I thought this book kind of switched to the subplot more abruptly than the first book.  But it ramped up the danger the FMC Angie was in.  I enjoyed Ian's characterization.  He's not a cut and paste of his brother Devon from the first book.  I also liked that we got to know some of the other Tident team members a little more with this book, especially Jake.  I really like the dynamic set up for the series.  There are so many characters and interaction...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished the ARC of Of Bargains and Betrayal by Ashley Bresee last evening.  That ending, wow, I'm still processing it.  I'm hoping some of it is a misunderstanding, because if not, then one of my favorite side characters is a bad-guy.  This was a really fun book and I really really enjoyed it.  I will be getting a shelf trophy of this one; it instantly became a favorite.  Enora Wynn is the bastard daughter of a king.  She has, for the most part, been able to skate through life without the typical expectations of a princess.  She's in her 30s and is able to live her own life and keep her own friends.  But once her father passes away suddenly her crappy half-bother inherits the crown and promptly marries Enora off to the old king of the neighboring kingdom.  Enora and a party of Odessans depart for the long and arduous journey through the Wastes to Grimmoria.  She gets a little too sloshed one evening of the journey a...

4.75⭐️3🌶 I finished the audio of Leather and Lace by Samantha Cole on my way home from work last night.  I liked this one more than I thought I would.  It took a while for me to really get into it.  The subplot hooked me and now I'm tempted to read some more in this series.  This was quite spicy, which I enjoyed and it really dove into the BDSM lifestyle.  I found that part interesting, engaging and very spicy.  This wasn't a full 5 stars for me for two reasons.  Some word choices by the author really pulled me out fo the story.  I didn't think I had ick words, but when they're read aloud to me, apparently I do.  Reason two was that I didn't love the narration on this one.  The FMC Kristen is supposed to be 26 and the female narrator sounded much older, in her 40s maybe.  The male narrator didn't change his voice that much for the other male characters and he pronounced some words a little weirdly for my taste.  Ye...

5⭐️1🌶 I finished my ARC of A Beautifully Crafted Lie by Evelyn Ash early this morning.  It was really good.  It was atmospheric and mysterious.  It follows more traditional Irish folklore concerning seely and unseely fae.  The FMC Bryndis is a witch.  But being a witch will get you reaped by the fae.  She also has a voice in her head.  It takes the entire book to reveal what that voice really is.  The MMC, Odhran, is a bastard fae prince who is very complicated; very dark, brooding shaddow daddy.  Humans and fae shouldn't be together, fae feed off humans, so there is a forbidden element to their attraction.  This is a slow burn that goes off the rails in the last few chapters.  I'm still not sure I've fully grasped everything that happened at the end.  The world building was phenomenal.  There was a found family element and the tension is the slow burn was superb.  I loved the depth of the story and witho...